This blog is about The Big Picture - information and insights about what goes on in the world outside our borders - and what it means for Americans. Unless otherwise specified, all photos from Deena Stryker archive.

Friday, October 25, 2013

Does MSNBC's Ed Schultz Have it All Wrong?

MSNBC’s hardest-hitting political anchor (or whatever the term is) is going for broke against the Trans-Pacific Trade Agreement because it will further destroy the American middle class. But that’s only part of the reason why we should oppose this agreement: the other part of the reason shows why workers in other countries also oppose it.

I believe it is not, as Ed claims, that the American 1% - in the guise of transnational corporations - wants to spend as little on wages and worker protection in order to make a maximum of profits. International corporations represent an international 1%, and THEY, as a group, want to make as much money as possible. NONE OF THEM care a damn about their 99% or anyone else’s. And of course they prefer to produce stuff where it costs least. But giving ‘American’ or ‘European’ jobs to Vietnamese doesn’t only hurt the former: it brings landowners’ serfs to cities where they become factory-owners serfs expected not only to produce but to consume in mindless cycle that really only benefits the 1%. (The 1% get to really choose what they consume, though it makes them increasingly mindless too.

Ed, I think you’re way to smart and knowledgeable to really believe your own rant. I suspect the problem is that in order to stay on MSNBC you have to limit yourself to telling only part of the story, the part that is relevant to American workers. I understand that. But please don’t try to suggest that Poor President Obama is just being advised by the wrong people. He’s too smart and knowledgeable not to know the color of the advice he is and has been getting since day one.

It’s unfortunate if admissions that even a personable, credentialed black man with a lovely family can’t save the United States from its accelerating decline are met with accusations of being a turncoat. But isn’t that similar to people who criticize Israel for imitating the Jews’ assassins being called anti-Semites?

When people like Ed Schultz can keep their job at MSNBC while telling the whole story, then progressives will be able to say in good faith that maybe this country can be saved without a revolution. Until then, pretending it’s so just kicks that can down the road.

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Welcome to Otherjones!

As announced a month ago, henceforth I will post all my blogs here, abandoning websites that support their editors, but not their writers. I'm looking for thirty readers willing to contribute $10 a month each. They will receive an article every day in their inbox.

The alternative press is replete with despair and ‘hope’, neither of which is helpful. ‘Squawking’, as Chris Hedges puts it, may alleviate some of the pain Americans experience at being identified with a government that brutalizes Others at will, but it doesn’t change the ‘facts on the ground’. As for hope, it is an easy cop-out: in the present state of the world, we can never be certain that tomorrow will come. Whether a barefoot child in Africa or a hedge-fund manager, all of us are the potential victims of hubris.

My goal is to prepare my readers in ways more important than stockpiling food and bandages for whatever happens, as we transition from an American century to a world century, helping them see through the web of lies with which we are being controlled.
Having lived for years at a time in half a dozen ‘foreign’, countries — learning their languages and histories — I have a unique ability to identify events that bear watching. That life, however, could not provide ‘retirement benefits’, so if you appreciate the unique combination of information and insight that characterizes my work, I hope you will integrate a small donation to Otherjones into your budget.

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P.S. I encourage you to review the archive, by clicking first on the year triangle, then on that of each month. You will find many posts from recent years still relevant today.

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If You Had Been Watching....

One of the worst aspects of the US media landscape is its neglect of what goes on in the rest of the world. When I returned from nineteen years of living in France, where I sometimes watched CNN’s excellent coverage of world events, I was surprised that in the US, CNN did nothing comparable. I called the main editorial office in New York and was told ’Americans aren’t interested in foreign affairs’, revealing one one the reasons
why the US government gets away with wreaking havoc around the world: Americans have no information that would prompt them to protest their county’s actions abroad.

The fact is that several countries’ governments — aside from the British — fund international television channels. These include France 24, NHK (Japan) , Al-Jazeera (Qatar) RT (Russia) and Telesur (Latin America). These channels usually broadcast in English, Spanish and Arabic, using native speakers, enabling most people in most parts of the world to hear news that their national outlets do not cover, getting a unique window onto the world.

Meanwhile, Americans are told that the channel that is most significant for them, RT, is propaganda!

RT is significant not only because, like the other foreign channels it offers a wide range of programs but because it includes opinions from many well-known Americans who never appear on our own msm.

I intend to try, insofar as my time permits, to signal news stories covered by these foreign channels that are absent from our own, many of which are significant.